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Adversity faced: QB Steve McNair missed five games early in the season due to a
back injury. After McNair returned, Tennessee was blown out 17-0 by Miami and 41-14 by
Baltimore in a five-game stretch.
How the team coped: Spectacularly well. Backup QB Neil O’Donnell was
sensational while McNair was hurt. The Titans put together impressive winning streaks
after both of their blowout losses. Then, despite being a wild-card entrant, the Titans
pulled off a miracle and two upsets to earn a berth in the Super Bowl.
For quite some time, the Tennessee Titans had been hearing a rumor from players on
other teams that they just couldn’t believe. Something about a totally foreign
concept to them known as home-field advantage.
Other teams talked about it, bragged about it, heck, even took it for granted. From
where the Titans stood, they didn’t have a clue what everyone else was so excited
about.
The Titans, you see, had been football orphans for longer than they cared to remember,
getting passed from foster home to foster home. A place to stay, but not a place to call
home. Certainly not a place to feel unconditionally loved.
The Titans used to be known as the Houston Oilers. They last played in Houston during
the 1996 season. They were a lame-duck team that season, since their relocation to
Nashville was approved by the league before the ’96 campaign began. Needless to say,
this gave them the appearance of a club with its bags packed by the door.
In ’97, the Titans played their home games at the Liberty Bowl in Memphis.
Everyone knew this was only temporary and that the team would eventually make Nashville
its permanent home. Needless to say, it still seemed that their bags were packed by the
door.
In ’98, the Titans finally played their games in Nashville, but those games were
played at Vanderbilt Stadium, which everyone knew was not going to be their permanent
location. The Nashville locale erased the sensation of packed bags by the door, but it
seemed as if the Titans had the price tags still attached to all of their furniture.
Finally, in ’99, the Titans had a permanent place to call home. Their new stadium
was completed. Adelphia Stadium finally gave them the feel of that home-field advantage
they had been hearing so much about. Finally they could stash their bags away in the
basement. Finally, they could take the tags off the furniture. Finally, they could put a
welcome mat by the front door. Finally, they could feel some love from the local fans.
Their long, winding, nomadic trip was complete. Home sweet home. Whatever adversity
they might face in 1999 would undoubtedly feel like little more than a speed bump after
the mountain they had just finished climbing.
The worst was when the Oilers were still in Houston after it had been announced they
would eventually be abandoning the city for Tennessee. Needless to say, this news
didn’t exactly lead to sell-out crowds for every home game remaining.
"The uncertainty and the newness of leaving really didn’t pose as much
disappointment as actually seeing no one come out and see us," OLT Brad Hopkins said.
"You’d go around town and hear people talking mess about us, like, ‘Why
don’t we just leave now?’ "
RB Rodney Thomas said, "We realized that we were all alone."
The move to Memphis the following season didn’t go much better. Since the Titans
were only playing in Memphis while waiting for their Nashville home to be completed, the
locals figured why bother getting to know their new neighbors.
"We finally went up to Memphis and thought we’d get a warm reception there,
but that situation turned bad," RB Eddie George said. "For one game at the
beginning of the season, there were more Raider fans than Oiler fans."
When the team moved to Vanderbilt Stadium for the 1998 season, gray skies and rain
clouds continued to hover. Would this team ever see sunshine again?
"When we went to Memphis, we expected to play in front of packed houses with great
support," Titans executive vice president and GM Floyd Reese said. "Those things
didn’t materialize. We had to get over and fight through that. When we went to
Vanderbilt, we expected better support there, and we had to fight through that. We
basically had to play 16 road games, and no one had ever done that. Again, you fought
through that. Thank goodness not everything happened to us at once. If they did, it would
have crushed us. It was ongoing. It was always, ‘What’s going to be our problem
this week? This offseason? This season?’ "
Without a fancy new stadium ready to be unveiled when they moved from Houston, the team
had to deal with spartan conditions.
"We met in trailers, like it was a trailer park," Titans S Blaine Bishop
said. "I felt like I was back in my freshman year in college at St. Joe’s. It
didn’t feel like the National Football League. Man, that was tough."
Hopkins said, "I remember when we were at Vanderbilt, we were in what I think was
a little baseball locker room under the stadium. There was no air conditioning. It was
really rough to try and shower. Everybody was crammed into one area, and you’re
thinking, ‘This is professional football, but there has to be something
better.’ "
Adding to the club’s woes was the fact that, while the competition was focused
totally on football, it had to deal with football and a million other details of the
constant moves.
"Instead of focusing on one thing — winning — you end up focusing on 15
things," Reese said.
Titans head coach Jeff Fisher said, "If I had to write a book about it, it
definitely would fall in the fiction section. You would not believe the type of things we
had to do. The difficulty was my intense desire to get out on the field for two hours to
coach and practice. I had to do everything else, from designing a practice facility to
inputting stadium designs. If you name it, we did it as a coaching staff. Because of the
enormous distractions … it seemed like coaching took a backseat. It has been very
difficult. … It is hard enough to win in the National Football League when things are
perfect and everyone’s on a level playing field."
George said, "The organization was in disarray at the time."
There is a saying, however, that what does not kill you makes you stronger. The Titans
were still breathing heading into this past season in their newly completed stadium and,
as a result, were sporting survival muscles certain to turn heads in any weight room
across America.
"It’s like we’ve been battle-toughened," Titans OG Bruce Matthews
said.
"We’ve been through the wars, and that isn’t just football. That’s
the circumstances that we played under and just all the things that we’ve gone
through."
Hopkins said, "Those are the kind of things that build character."
Fisher said, "This is a strong football team mentally and emotionally."
The Titans had three straight 8-8 seasons under their belt heading into the 1999
season, and preseason prognosticators anticipated only slight improvement at best.
Had the so-called experts placed greater weight on the fact that the Tennessee Nomads
finally had a real home, finally were playing on a level playing field with the rest of
the league, perhaps the Titans’ dramatic improvement in 1999 would have been
foreseen.
One game into the season, the Titans finally learned what everyone else in the league
was talking about when the subject was home-field advantage.
Trailing the Bengals 35-26 midway through the fourth quarter, the Titans roared back
for a 36-35 win.
"It was our first time playing a game that counted in our stadium,"
then-Titans LB Joe Bowden said. "Now we have a great record in our stadium.
That’s how we wanted to get started and get all that rolling."
Five days later, that ball took a crazy bounce in which it seemingly rolled onto a busy
street and fell down an open manhole when starting QB Steve McNair injured his back
throwing the ball on a Friday and had surgery to repair a ruptured disc two days later. He
missed five straight games because of the injury.
The team’s initial reaction was the same one you felt when your high school
teacher announced a pop quiz.
"That was probably one of the biggest shockers," Titans CB Denard Walker
said. "When that happened, we were like, uh-oh, we’re in trouble now. We knew
(backup QB) Neil (O’Donnell) could do a good job. There’s no doubt. But the
bottom line is that you don’t have your leader no more. You don’t have the guy
that makes this thing go."
Titans DL Josh Evans said, "We were pretty scared, pretty worried."
Titans S Perry Phenix said, "The team was shocked because it came from
nowhere."
The team’s second reaction to the news was the same as when the aforementioned
high school teacher unleashes a pop quiz and, after momentary panic, you realize
you’ve done all the necessary reading and are ready for anything thrown your way.
"We knew Neil could come in and do a hell of a job," Evans said.
Fisher said, "They have confidence in Neil. Neil showed in the preseason that
he‘s capable of moving the ball."
Titans FB Lorenzo Neal said, "Any time that you have a veteran quarterback like
Neil O’Donnell — who’s been to ‘the Show,’ who’s done things
that’s been in a positive sense, who’s taken a team to a Super Bowl, who’s
been in (multiple) AFC championships — it gives this team a ray of hope. We were
like, ‘Hey, we’ve got Neil O’Donnell! This guy can play. This isn’t
his first rodeo.’ So I think this gave this team some confidence and just made us
stick together more."
Phenix said, "Like all great teams we came together and we knew what we had to
do."
Did they ever.
A 26-9 win over the expansion Browns quickly followed.
Then came the real test. A road trip to powerhouse Jacksonville in which the Titans won
20-19.
Even without McNair they were 3-0 and believing that the start of something special was
building.
"I think us beating Jacksonville in Jacksonville early in the season kind of put
us over the hump and gave us some confidence that we can beat anybody as long as we keep
focusing and play hard for 60 minutes," Bishop said.
Neal said, "I said, ‘You know what, this has the makings of a good team, and
the team doesn’t quit and it has a lot of fire to it.’ I just knew that this
team could be good."
Tennessee won two of its next three games. Even though McNair had played in only one
contest, the Titans had a shiny 5-1 record. O’Donnell, in particular, was playing
extremely well, tossing eight touchdowns compared to only four interceptions in the
five-game stretch McNair missed because of his back injury.
As unfortunate as McNair’s injury was, many positives came out of the five-game
experience.
"I think that this team learned some identity," Neal said. "Just learned
that, hey, we can win. …
"I think it helped us a lot. It let us know that, hey, we won with Neil, we can
with with Steve. As a matter of fact, I think it made Steve better. It made Steve say, you
know what, these guys won without me. … So I think it let Steve know that, hey, there
is a guy out there (who can get the job done). And it made Steve play better. It made
Steve prepare better. And Steve is a good guy, and Steve works hard."
O’Donnell played so well, in fact, that the media started to speculate whether he
might wrest the starting job away even when McNair was fully recovered. For his part,
Fisher never wavered in his stance that McNair would be the starter once he was healthy
enough.
"We were very specific as to Steve’s situation, in that Steve would return
when he was healthy enough to do so," Fisher said. "There was no question in our
minds that was going to take place. The question was how long it was going to take Steve
to get back. We decided that Steve was our starter a number of years ago, and the deal
that we put together late in the offseason for Neil was in fact so that Neil would be able
to come in in the event there was a problem due to injury, that he would give us a chance
to continue to win and he did so. I need to point out that … a big part of … the
success of the season was Neil’s ability to come in in a very short period of time,
learn our offense, play and start the second game of the regular season and take us to a
4-1 record while Steve was out. I think that says an awful lot about Neil O’Donnell,
his ability and his capabilities to play in this league."
Continued on Page 2
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